Throughout Paul Outlaw’s piece BigBlackOctoberSurprise, I kept thinking about resistance. Both the political act and something more localized and internal—pushing back against ideas, systems, and destructive thoughts and acts.
How does resistance take form? It can be protest, physical obstruction, and refusal to cede ground. But a tiny drip of water can cut away at a massive rock over thousands of years. Can it be slow, subtle, and tenacious? Can it also be survival in the face of violence, oppression, and every effort to take away your humanity?
Written and performed by Outlaw and directed by Sara Lyons, the show uses a lot of effective images of confinement and tells stories of sexual assault, slavery, and violence committed against Black men. The piece sheds light on the ways people fight back against oppressive and incomprehensible situations and systems around them. People are resilient and adaptive. But it all comes at a great cost.
In the Before Times, Outlaw was scheduled to be perform a Kafka-inspired, full-length show called BBC (Big Black Cockroach) at REDCAT this month in Los Angeles. But instead, he is presenting this shorter piece that transforms some of those ideas into an online format, mixing pre-recorded material and live.
Using the concept of metamorphosis, and referencing Kafka and Ovid, the election of Donald Trump and the pending election next week, the scenes blur where we are, who all the voices are, but it is unmistakably of the now.
In some moments the show seems to be inside the mind of a white woman, Greta Sanderson, who discovers, to her surprise, she has woken up inside the body of a black man. In other moments, that black man, Gregory Samson, is demanding Greta’s husband let him out of the strange prison cell he seems to be trapped in, recording him from all angles with security cameras. Greta rubs her arms and explores this newfound body, while Gregory claws at the walls and the carpets.
And then the question becomes, is the real prison simply America? Gregory (or Greta or Outlaw), at one point, refers to himself as a “4th of July prisoner.”
When BigBlackOctoberSurprise functions as a mosaic of words, images, and ideas—all pretty potent on their own (hoods, guns, rape, graves, a phoenix, a plantation)—it has a poetic quality. The voices deliver vivid pleas (“I’m disappearing Robert. I’m being erased,” “I rise from the smoke like a phoenix,” “Come home,” “Help me”). There’s plenty to parse and layered with the images of Outlaw’s body in this cell, constantly under surveillance, we can appreciate the power and oppression of the white gaze on Black men.
When it gets politically specific—Zapruder footage of Jackie Kennedy, Trump’s inauguration with Melania Trump blurred out but Barron visible, a blurred President Obama, Michelle Obama, and the Obama children—it becomes conceptually less clear.
If we are tying together the power of white mistresses of plantations exacting violence upon enslaved men, with white women today threatening Black men with police violence, I’m with you. And the storytelling here is very strong.
I’m less sure about these specific First Ladies, some of whom are, without a doubt, Karens. But I was not sure what their particular deployment here meant.
Eventually, we are greeted by Outlaw himself, live on stage, wearing a necklace that says FOXY and a delicious peacock feather green eyeshadow.
He tells us about his own diagnosis of high blood pressure after the 2016 election, which he argued to his physician was simply “post-election stress.” But his doctor pointed out, as a Black man, he is at higher risk of hypertension, heart attack and stroke.
But really, isn’t America always finding new ways to try to kill Black men?
So, he offers his own dream of resistance to this administration, this moment, and this world. What if he never cedes this stage? His hope has always been if he’s going to die, why not on stage as a “big finale.”
His voice and presence, live on stage, is clear and direct. He’s an enchanting storyteller and in this zoom moment, we (me) crave the live, the unexpected, and even a direct gaze.
His voice in a theater, on a stage, in front of us also brings the powerful mélange of ideas into a concrete realm. Here is what resistance looks like. Here is a Black man who is not giving up this space or this fight.